Final Fantasy VIII holds the dubious honor of being the first game that made me question Squaresoft's perfection as a company.

It's not a terrible game. It certainly isn't a good one. It's not the weakest of the series, but it's far from the golden standard set by IV and VI. The principal cast is largely unlikeable - a standoffish Emo Teen loner (yes, it's been said before, but there really is no denying it), a Shallow Love Interest, a Rival Turned Evil, a hitman who can't bring himself to carry out a contract on a woman, which one might have taken into consideration before giving him the job, a bloodthirsty Genki Girl - they begin to grate on one's nerves as soon as they're introduced, with the notable exceptions of Zell and Quistis. The plot wraps itself up in the most contrived and abrupt fashion possible, regardless of how one interprets it.

Still, the game has its good points. The gameplay itself really isn't bad. Junctions and summons are a decent change of pace. Triple Triad is an addicting minigame - at least until you begin to acquire new rules that stack the odds severely in favor of the house and are incredibly difficult to ditch. The integration of gameplay and CGI is perhaps the best I've ever seen. Laguna, Kiros and Ward are weird and likable characters who end up in some utterly bizarre situations, and my opinion of the game would be much, much higher if it were about them instead of Squall and Co.

But it isn't. It's about flying colleges fighting each other with motorcycle squads. Still, it's not a bad game, if you ignore the plot and half the cast and take its gameplay mechanics on their own merits, and it could have been worse. It could have been about extreme underwater soccer.

A truly godawful entry to the series. Extremely broken gameplay mechanics. There are at least a half-dozen ways to break the game (see: Gamebreaker on the main page). But not only is the gameplay broken, it is boring. The Draw System is a true marvel at test a player's patience as they do nothing but draw magic from enemies for several minutes at a time. Magic is truly worthless as it's almost always linked to either your stats or your equipment. The Summoning System also is a massive test of patience. Overlong with button mashing sequences to boost its effectiveness, overpowered, and completely spammable. You can get through most foes just be spamming the Summoning system alone.

It also stars a cast of genuinely unlikeable characters. Squall is a Wangsty emo boy who'll probably get on your last nerve by the end of the first disc. Rinoa is a skank Damsel Scrappy who quickly jumped from her current boyfriend (whom she was told had just died) to Squall almost without missing a beat. The rest? To call them one-dimensional would be a massive overstatement. It doesn't matter much as the game all but forgets about them after the first disc.

And the plot? What plot?!? Was there a plot to FF8? The story kept changing at every scene. The story is so disjointed and muddled I could shuffle the pages to any of the Harry Potter novels and it still be more coherent than this. One moment, your a part of La Resistance. The next, you're saving the school from somebody, and after that, you're In Space. Almost every story segment and Contrived Coincidence end up having little to no relevance to one another.

The only thing redeemable to FF8 was the minigame. Other than that, the game was pure, unadulterated garbage. This began the trend of Squaresoft being more concerned with style over substance which culminated with the movie, which nearly sank the company. If this didn't have the Final Fantasy name on it, it would've been sent to the bargain bin within a week after its initial release, never to be heard from again.

Final Fantasy VIII could have easily aped everything about it's wildly successful predecessor and simply been Final Fantasy VII-2. Instead, Square decided to get ballsy. Instead of loading the game with Mind Screw after Mind Screw, they told a story about characters. Instead of recycling the same character building mechanics from the previous seven entries, they replaced it with Junctions and Drawing. And after the extremely villain-centric plots of the previous two games, featuring a scene-stealing Mad Clown in one and a pretty boy with a god complex, they introduced a villain that worked with subtlety behind the scenes.

Whether all of this works or not really depends on how open you are to a very different type of game. It's not a return to the SNES era of yore, and it's not a direct copy of Final Fantasy VII. This is a game that expects the player to think more about its plot instead of telling you what to think. It's central romance, despite being a Foregone Conclusion, is developed slowly over time and hence feels more realistic than other games in its genre. Even the battle system asks you to put a little thought into it. While you could spam summons over and over for random fights, they lose effectiveness the further you get into the game and you fail to gain any of the benefits from actually using abilities and Junctioning magic to stats. Actually utilizing the game's mechanics gives you unprecedented control over your characters growths, though this does come at the cost of character specialization - characters quickly become defined only by their limit breaks and nothing else.

The main character, instead of being the traditional happy-go-lucky adventurer, is someone who questions everything. Unlike your average Emo Teen, he legitimately attempts to understand the world around him and define and accomplish his goals. As a character study, Squall is extremely compelling, and as a reflection of the impulsive and less introspective Rinoa (who has an unfortunate habit of being imperiled at an alarming rate). The supporting cast has an intriguing and entertaining chemistry, though the lush subplots of some of the other games are sadly absent.

It's a game that every Final Fantasy fan should play with an open mind. You might just love it the way a lot of other folks do. And if not, there's always The Spoony Experiment.